Thursday, November 24, 2005

Thanksunning

The sunsets and sunrises this month in Santa Barbara continue to stun me. The latest series, from last night, ends with the shot above. They start here.

[Later...] I just added some midnight fog over the city, plus this morning's terrific Thanksgiving Day sunrise. I shot the latter at a variety of white point settings. All beautiful in their own ways.

Fucking for Fitness

That's the better headline for Forbes' Is Sex Necessary? Thanks to Sean Bonner for the pionter.

Be there now

Sean Bonner tells me Metrobloging has expanded to Islamabad. Vancouver too.

He also points to a Forbes story that says sex is very good for you. I always wanted to do a headline

Hail Val

One of my oldest buddies in the biz, Val Landi, has a blog.

I first met Val in the earliest 80s, when he worked with IDG (on Computerworld, I believe, back when CW was by far the top magazine in the trade). We're the same age, from nearby towns in Bergen County, New Jersey, and with common backgrounds in broadcasting and publishing (Val with Metromedia and other large bodies, and me with little outfits in North Carolina). The primary difference between us was levels of success, and sophistication. Val was a high level executive with an $X billion Northeast company while I was a partner in a little struggling advertising agency in The South. He was also a certified scholar (with a Masters in history and literature from Harvard) while I barely got out of college. I believe by the time we'd met he'd also already published his first book.

Since then Val's career has taken him back and forth to both coasts and many places between. (Mine too, come to think of it.) We've stayed good friends through the decades, cheering each other on at whatever we happened to be doing.

Right now Val is getting ready, among other things, to publish his first novel. He's also sharing the experience on his blog. The topic of the book is more than current:

The plot of my new novel, of A Woman from Cairo, is about a young Egyptian documentary film maker, one L'Houssaine Kortu, who was recruited by the highest ranks of al Qaeda to create a documentary in Afghanistan about the leadership of the Holy War. 

The prologue of the book describes Kortu's accidental filming of the assassination of The Sheik, a fictionalized Osama bin Laden, and his escape with the film footage to Pakistan and eventually back to temporary, fleeting safety in Cairo.

This fictionalized bin Laden's demise illustrates one of the major sub-themes of the book...

Hopefully, that will whet your appetite for the book as well as the blog.